Kurt Vonnegut’s Happy Birthday, Wanda June takes aim at American manhood but misfires.
Picture a den done up with stuffed heads of big game mounted on the wall. There is so much dander floating around that the maid’s allergies were triggered, so she quit. Jungle rot is stuck under a kid’s fingernails. There’s something else in the air: Pride for a fallen American war hero. “This room is making everyone sick!” The room is America.
That room — a monument to aggression, violence, colonialism, and, undergirding it all, masculinity — is the setting for Happy Birthday, Wanda June (through November 29 at the Duke on West 42nd Street) a 1970 satire with absurdist elements by Kurt Vonnegut. This was the era when supposedly intelligent people drove around displaying bumper stickers informing us that “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” This play aspires to be the theatrical equivalent of that bumper sticker.
Though chiefly designed along anti–Vietnam War lines, Wanda June is broad enough to be repurposed today as a merry lampoon of gun culture and sexual aggression and all things masculine, a quality now declared toxic by, for instance, the New York Times, which loves this play. In Vonnegut’s eyes, the more masculine you are, the more sinister. And America is for him a kind of roiling font of masculine energy where misguided fathers poison their sons with hunting lessons and tales of the glory of combat. The play’s central character, a big-game hunter and soldier with many human and animal kills to his credit, represents “Hemingway-esque machismo and American exceptionalism,” says a press release. As you know, those things are reprehensible.
In a role that Marsha Mason performed on stage in 1970, Kate MacCluggage plays the abandoned Penelope, who lives in a New York City apartment with her twelve-year-old son. She is engaged to one man, a gentle doctor her son derides as a “fairy,” while dating another one, a vacuum-cleaner salesman. Her Odysseus, a bearded, growling hunk of manliness named Harold Ryan (Jason O’Connell), has been declared legally dead after having been missing for eight years while on a hunt. His past includes killing a Nazi war criminal; his hunting partner happens to be the guy who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. Quite a pair, these two. Why couldn’t either of them just decline to participate, to end the cycle of violence? If you protest that that would have meant letting the masculine aggression of the Axis powers carry the day and perpetuate their own violence without impediment, you have thought through this argument a step farther than a child has, which is to say a step farther than Vonnegut has.
Ah, replies the author, but Wanda June is merely an anarchic satire of the excesses of masculinity, not a policy statement. As Penelope tells us at the outset, “This is a simple-minded play about men who enjoy killing and those who don’t.” The title character, when she appears, turns out to be a dead little girl who was run over by a drunk driver: another instance of destruction wrought by men. Vonnegut’s name for the pilot who dropped the bomb is “Colonel Looseleaf Harper,” and the silly name suggests the flavor of satire in the age of Terry Southern and Joseph Heller. O’Connell, in the lead role, takes things further with simian moves — swinging his arms, sniffing the air, gorilla grunts. Doorbells in the house make (loud, bizarre) wild-animal noises. We’re in a sort of subconscious of absurdly exaggerated masculinity, which is a pacifist interpretation of the basis of the internally and externally violent America. Everything from bombing Vietnam to mayhem in Central Park and being brusque with the Missus is on the same continuum here.
Masculinity gone haywire could be the basis for a pointed satire but the thing about a successful satire is . . . it’s funny. Wanda June mostly isn’t. Mostly it feels as if it’s playing to the cheap seats. It might have had more salience in 1970, when cowboys and soldiers were all over TV and average dads actually did teach their young sons how to handle a hunting rifle. Now that culture of manliness is a subculture and the dominant view is snarky disdain for whatever Hemingway wannabees may be left among us. Referring to a rifle as an “iron penis” or suggesting there’s something sexual about men killing each other might have been cutting-edge stuff in 1970. Today that kind of material feels as hoary as the mother-in-law jokes the Vegas comics were doing in the same era. Satire that amounts to telling the audience what it already believes, in terms it already uses, isn’t cutting. It’s just flattery.